News of the Week; August 31, 2016

GAMES

1. New lawsuit targets Steam, alleges patent infringement
2. Steam Targeted in Lawsuit for Alleged Patent Infringement
3. Japanese truck driver playing Pokemon Go kills pedestrian: Popular game now detects speed increase, asks if player is driving, company says
4. Pokemon Go Takes Distracted Driving to a Lethal Level
5. French Education minister: Get rare Pokémon out of our schools – The minister is worried that “legendary” Pokemon could draw strangers.
6. Belgians are hunting books, instead of Pokemon
7. How long can we expect the Pokémon Go craze to last?: Data suggests game could retain tens of millions of players for a long while.
8. Someone is porting Pokémon Go to the Dreamcast VMU: Also, did you know there’s a Dreamcast VMU homebrew scene?
9. Use Agreements to Capture and Control IP like it’s a Pokémon
10. Mobile has become an indie-hostile market: Sky-high barriers to entry have made mobile into a space no indie creator or small studio should even consider
11. Japan twice as good as U.S. at monetizing mobile players
12. Steam Spy opts to publicize game data despite dev takedown requests
13. Steam Spy will now refuse all requests for removal of data: Techland prompted a change in policy – and a reversal of prior decisions – at Steam Spy
14. Ubisoft is canning its F2PGhost Recon and Epic Lootgames
15. “Where are all the women at?”: Farmville Tropic Escape lead Nicole Opas offers advice on recruiting women devs and appealing to an audience without insulting them
16. Twitter Sued For Right of Publicity Violations Over Profile-Trading Game 
17. Microsoft cancels free-to-play Halo Online
18. Oculus Explains Why They Didn’t Launch Touch with the Rift 
19. PlayStation VR Pre-Orders Had “Quickest Sellout in GameStop’s History”
20. Blizzard Launches Facebook Streaming for Battle.net Games
21. Overwatch and other Blizzard games can now stream natively to Facebook: Blizzard Streaming is part of a new client update
22. Facebook has finally made its move against one of Amazon’s biggest properties
23. GameStop hardware sales tumble after Neo, Scorpio announcements
24. UKIE’s big UK game biz concern post-Brexit: Access to game dev talent
25. Another Denuvo-protected game cracked just weeks after release: Quick Inside crack shows that industry’s best DRM is no longer safe.
26. Remember When Cracking Groups Said Denuvo Would End Game Piracy? Yeah, Didn’t Happen
27. Snapchat meets gaming: Gatorade launches in-app 8-bit Serena Williams tennis game
28. Parents Didn’t Just Dislike Super Nintendo 25 Years Ago—They Thought It Was a Scam
29. Esports Corruption: Gambling, Doping, and Global Governance (John Holden, Ryan Rodenberg & Anastasios Kaburakis)

DIGITAL

1. Kim Dotcom wins right to live stream extradition court hearing: US authorities opposed the move, but New Zealand judge rules live broadcast can start on Wednesday, as internet entrepreneur battles online piracy charges
2. On appeal in LA Times defacement case, lawyers say there was no “damage”: “For there to be CFAA Damage, there must be actual harm to a computer system.”
3. Twitter, Google, Facebook “consciously failing” to police extremism, MPs claim: Committee alarmingly demands “terrestrial star wars”—says cops need “high-tech” hub.
4. War of the World Wide Webs: D.C. Circuit Refuses Terror Victims’ Attempt to Seize Internet Domain Names 
5. “We’re a tech company, we’re not a media company,” says Facebook founder: Social network giant under EU pressure for not editing hateful and illegal posts.
6. Facebook is trying to get rid of bias in Trending news by getting rid of humans
7. Facebook fires human editors, algorithm immediately posts fake news: Facebook makes its Trending feature fully automated, with mixed results.
8. Did Facebook Defame Megyn Kelly?: Which is a different way of asking: Can a bot commit libel?
9. Canada’s ad industry cracking down on paid endorsements on social media: Influencers who mention companies or products in posts must reveal if they’ve been paid starting in 2017
10. Study shows YouTube and linear TV can find common ground
11. WhatsApp does about face, will serve ads in Facebook-owned app: Nominal subscription fee was dropped in January of this year.
12. Inside the bizarre French conspiracy theory that the viral ‘burkini’ photos were staged
13. How Nextdoor reduced racist posts by 75%
14. “Silicon Valley is hostile to diversity,” says Slack Director of Engineering Leslie Miley
15. Peter Thiel Violates Core Principles of Silicon Valley
16. It’s ‘digital heroin’: How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies
17. Apple must pay Ireland $14.5 billion in taxes, rules European Commission: Lengthy probe concludes that Apple’s tax benefits are illegal.
18. How Apple—and the Rest of Silicon Valley—Avoids the Tax Man
19. EU Copyright Law Undermines Innovation and Creativity on the Internet. Mozilla is Fighting for Reform
20. France Passes Copyright Law Demanding Royalties For Every Image Search Engines Index Online
21. An Unfortunately Typical French Initiative (Plus Ca Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose)
22. Is hosting providers’ safe harbour the real problem of copyright owners? A new article
23. EU may require YouTube, DailyMotion to seek deals with music industry
24. If You’re Angry About Twitter Banning Someone ‘Permanently’ For Sharing Olympics GIFs, Blame Copyright Law
25. Handicapping The Olympic Committee’s Quest To Control Tweeting
26. Appeals Court Tosses Search Warrant Used By Louisiana Sheriff In Attempt To Silence Critical Blogger
27. Twitter Sued For Right of Publicity Violations Over Profile-Trading Game
28. Selfies in voting booths: Depending on where you live, they may be illegal – A New Hampshire law says selfie ban is needed to curtail vote buying and coercion.
29. Snapchat Announces Partnership With the NFL: Snapchat has announced a partnership with the National Football League to create sponsored Lenses that allow users to superimpose a helmet onto their heads while using the app.
30. US unveils charges against KickassTorrents, names two more defendants: Admins gave users who uploaded up to 1,000 torrent files “Achievement” awards.
31. Harvard Is Digitizing Nearly 40 Million Pages Of Case Law So You Can Access It Online And For Free
32. People Were Stealing Music Long Before Millennials Ruined Everything With Internet Pirating
33. Newspaper Archive Disappears From Google, Because Company Wants To Cash In
34. Apple’s In-App Purchase Policy Should Put Customers First
35. Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood: California bill targets publicizing actors’ birth dates
36. What ALEXA & AI Means For The Future Of Commerce
37. The Man Who Created LeapPad Wants To Turn Your Eyes into a Mouse
38. Trading in stock of medical device paused after hackers team with short seller: St. Jude Medical declares claim of vulnerability “false and misleading.”
39. Attack of the Killer Robots: Forget about drones, forget about dystopian sci-fi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here. Meet the small band of dedicated optimists battling nefarious governments and bureaucratic tedium to stop the proliferation of killer robots and, just maybe, save humanity from itself.
40. The Hype—And Hope—Of Artificial Intelligence
41. The world wide cage: Technology promised to set us free. Instead it has trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency
42. Anarchy Has Ensued In Courts’ Handling Of Online Contract Formation (Round Up Post)
43. Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society – Cases & Materials: An Open Casebook: 3rd Edition 2016 (James Boyle & Jennifer Jenkins)
44. Theoretical Inquiries in Law – Vol 17, No 2 (2016): The Constitution of Information: From Gutenberg to Snowden (The CEGLA Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law)

CREATIVITY

1. China Advances Film Industry Law, Cracks Down on “Western Values”: Topics addressed in the draft of China’s film industry rulebook include market access for foreign movies, censorship and how to handle artists “tainted” by drug and prostitution scandals.
2. Instagram model and makeup artist sues Richard Prince over copyright infringement: Part of the New Portraits series, the work at the centre of the case was shown—and sold—at Frieze New York last year
3. Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke and TI launch appeal against Blurred Lines verdict: Lawyers for the trio argue the judge was wrong to allow comparison of the recordings of the hit and Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up
4. “Blurred Lines” Appeal Gets Support From More Than 200 Musicians: An eclectic group of artists from R. Kelly to Hans Zimmer tell the 9th Circuit that the verdict, if allowed to stand, “is very dangerous to the music community.”
5. Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley Win Copyright Infringement Case: Songwriter accusing the country superstars of stealing “Remind Me” is defeated in court
6. This Is What Happens When Courts Decide What Is and Isn’t Art: Cook County says rock, country, rap, and DJing aren’t “fine arts,” and they could collect some hefty taxes for it. But it’ll be an uphill battle against history, taste, and case law.
7. Two Copyright Cases to Watch Raise Novel Legal Issues In Canada
8. Beneath Louis Vuitton’s inability to take a joke, a serious First Amendment question
9. Getty sued for US$1 billion after US$120 demand to photographer
10. Honduran reporter convicted of criminal defamation
11. Trader Joe’s vs. Pirate Joe’s: Appeals Court Revives Cross-Border Trademark Fight
12. Letting It Go: The End Of Windowing (And What Comes Next) – There are few concepts more fundamental to the video media business than that of content “windowing” – yet even this strategy is crumbling under the pressures of digital distribution. How will rights owners maximize the value of their content in the post-window era? The answer depends on how badly you want it.
13. Could This Be the Year Movies Stopped Mattering?
14. The Alt-Right Has Its Own Comedy TV Show On A Time Warner Network: Adult Swim’s Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace is identity content for trolls.
15. ‘Captain America’ Writer Nick Spencer: Why I Turned Steve Rogers into a Supervillain
16. Let’s Teach Textbooks A Lesson: The prices of college textbooks are absurd—to the point where authors have to defend their $300 books. But we could, thankfully, be turning a corner.
17. Head Of Anti-Counterfeiting Lobbying Group Says He’s Going To Make Counterfeit Techdirt T-Shirts
18. Were the First Artists Mostly Women?: Three-quarters of handprints in ancient cave art were left by women, study finds.
19. European Copyright Leak Exposes Plans to Force the Internet to Subsidize Publishers (EFF)

COMMUNICATIONS & BROADCASTING

1. Fox News petitions for darkness, secrecy in sexual-harassment case
2. The Twilight of Fox News: As pay TV slowly declines, cable news faces a demographic cliff. And nobody has further to fall than the merchant of right-wing outrage.
3. Net neutrality guidelines land in Europe, provide fuzzy rules on fast lanes: Open Internet activists hail the rest of the text a victory over telcos.
4. Comcast/NBC Tone Deafness, Not ‘Millennials’ To Blame For Olympics Ratings Drop
5. No, Bloomberg, the Olympics didn’t stumble because of Millennials. It stumbled because of NBC.
6. AT&T explains why it sometimes delays Google Fiber access to poles: Google Fiber can’t always access AT&T utility poles despite US-wide agreement.
7. AT&T doesn’t want to repay money it got from alleged overcharges
8. AT&T’s common carrier status helps it defeat data throttling lawsuit: But AT&T could still face $100 million fine from FCC.
9. AT&T Dodges FTC Throttling Lawsuit Using Title II Classification It Vehemently Opposed
10. How Is This Not A Net Neutrality Violation, Sprint?
11. FCC admits defeat in municipal broadband, won’t appeal court loss: Cities seeking to expand broadband could still appeal judges’ decision, though.
12. Congressman to FCC: Fix phone network flaw that allows eavesdropping – SS7 weakness, leak of phone numbers could let hackers spy on “half of Congress.”
13. The Future Of Media And Some Implications For Regulation

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. Facebook recommended that this psychiatrist’s patients friend each other
2. WhatsApp’s Privacy Cred Just Took a Big Hit
3. Privacy Groups File FTC Complaint Over Whatsapp Facebook Privacy ‘Bait And Switch’
4. Why an NFL Superstar’s Lawsuit Against ESPN Represents a Threat for Media
5. Court: Okay For Trial To Move Forward Against ESPN For Tweeting JPP’s Medical Chart
6. Literal Fashion Police Arrest Hundreds Of WhatsApp And Instagram Users In Iran
7. Canadian Law Enforcement Want Government To Force People To Turn Over Their Passwords
8. Actively exploited iOS flaws that hijack iPhones patched by Apple: Jailbreak vulnerabilities allowed attackers to tap encrypted chat messages.
9. The Million Dollar Dissident: NSO Group’s iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender
10. Hackers attack site of Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones, post racist abuse
11. Blame Donald Trump and the internet for all those racist attacks on Leslie Jones
12. Homeland Security investigating Leslie Jones website hack: The attack that saw the “Ghostbusters” star’s personal information leaked to the web is now under investigation by US authorities.
13. Officials blame “sophisticated” Russian hackers for voter system attacks: FBI reportedly informed Arizona of possible Russian hack in June.
14. Ashley Madison Investigation Findings Released by OPC
15. The most absurd Internet privacy class-action settlement ever: Lawyers get millions. Consumers get nothing. E-mail snooping continues unabated.
16. Is your employer watching you? Online profiling blurs the boundary of our public and private lives
17. How Airbnb Kills Our Ideas of Privacy: To make its home-away-from-home vibe work, the online housing broker insists on a level of transparency from hosts and guests that creates a level of intimacy bordering on the unseemly.
18. Hacker who stole 2.9 million credit card numbers is Russian lawmaker’s son: Roman Seleznev, aka “Track2,” was found guilty of 38 counts relating to fraud and theft.
19. Differential Privacy is Vulnerable to Correlated Data — Introducing Dependent Differential Privacy
20. DOJ lawyer who leaked Bush spy program is censured for ethics failure: Whistleblower thought program was “probably illegal as it was not court-supervised.”

jon